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Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them
- pluralmonad 3mo agoHopefully most of these folks that have been scammed know how to sail the high seas.
- chuckadams 3mo agoWhich is a bit tricky on a Playstation. Sure you can scrounge up some Jellyfin-ish sort of thing, but most people buy on the console platform because they specifically don't want to jump through hoops.
- jmclnx 3mo agoAnd yet Sony wonders why people pirate their movies. In this case here the owners who had their movies stolen should be able to steal them back.
- joe_mamba 3mo agoSony's recent movies aren't even worth pirating
- trencedamp 3mo agoMadame Web anyone
- cryo32 3mo agoMy daughter went to watch that and walked out. To compare, she managed to make it through Cats.
- forgetfreeman 3mo agoJesus. That might be the most succinctly brutal movie review I've ever seen. quietly scratches Madam Web off the to-do list
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- s_dev 3mo agoInto and Beyond the Spiderverse are flawless movies.
- bluescrn 3mo agoThe first one was 8 years ago, in the pre-Covid world.
- mrweasel 3mo agoIf you cared enough, I do wonder if you could win in court, if you pirated a movie that you purchased on the PS5, but Sony removed. It would cost you an ungodly amount of money to defend yourself against Sony, and I don't know the exact words of the "license", but it seems like a reasonable action to take.
- Sohcahtoa82 3mo agoIt'd be a case where the spirit of the law clashes with the letter of the law. Sony's lawyers would argue about how things are, while your defense has to argue about how things should be. Which way it goes likely depends on how sympathetic the judge is rather than actual arguments being made.
- cube00 3mo agoI wonder if their use of a "buy" button would potentially weaken their case regardless of the language they put in the EULA.
- i_play_stax 3mo agoPiracy is not theft.
- esalman 3mo agoThis. If I didn't pirate movies and games and Windows and apps when I was young, I probably wouldn't be in a position to pay for multiple streaming and Xbox subscription now.
- robin_reala 3mo agoObviously media permanence is the best solution, but in the absence of that we just need laws that say that if the purchase isn’t time limited to something a reasonable user would consider a rental (48hrs? a week?) then companies that withdraw access rights need to refund in full the purchase cost.
- jagged-chisel 3mo agoLet's add inflation to that. Or charge interest for the loan.
- kmeisthax 3mo agoThe most frustrating thing about all of this is that if I'd published a game on PlayStation and then told Sony to rip it out of people's libraries, they'd tell me to pound sand. The contracts you sign to ship games on PlayStation specifically include redownload rights. So Sony knows this is a problem, and yet for whatever reason decided NOT to secure the rights they'd need for the digital purchases to actually work like a purchase.
- k_roy 3mo agoThis is nothing new and the reason I went from being the biggest media collector to collecting nothing now. To put it in perspective, I bought Get Him to the Greek on Prime video shortly after it came out. A month later, the "exclusive broadcast rights" changed, and I was no longer able to access it.
- bell-cot 3mo ago> need to refund in full the purchase cost. In practical terms, the logistics of many-years-later refunds would be unwieldy at best. Do the purchase records still exist? What if I no longer have that credit card or email address? How can you prove you're the heir of the deceased? What if I now live in a country where the "deletion" status is different? And how could you stop all the scammers who smelled free money? Alternative: The gov't randomly picks 24 citizens from a pool of applicants who reasonably prove that they were harmed by the deletion. Those 24 are given legal authority to fiat-revoke all copyright protection on a "reasonable and proportional" number of the deleting corporation's currently copyrighted works. Or upstream of them, as "appropriate".
- lemoncookiechip 3mo agoIf they offered refunds this would still be terrible. They don't even offer refunds.
- arcticbison 3mo ago[flagged]
- trencedamp 3mo agoI read recently that PlayStation users are moving to PC en masse, and also Xbox has been gutted by layoffs, and there's a backlash against Nintendo for the switch 2 pricing. Is the age of the console finally coming to an end?
- ryanm101 3mo agoTo be fair had RAM prices not screwed up the steam machine consoles would have been dooms earlier. They are about to enter a slow decline before death
- inigyou 3mo agoConsoles are suffering from the RAM price crisis just as much as PCs.
- ColdStream 3mo agoMaybe, they still aren't going to have the same economy of scale or the business loss leading tendency of some consoles. Valve doesn't want to be subsidizing hardware that can be used as a desktop. that puts them on the back foot. But I suspect Xbox is eventually going to go the path of Steam cube and end up licensing out hardware/software spec and let multiple vendors make hardware. The 3DO sales model may rise again some 35 years after the fact.
- treyd 3mo agoConsoles made sense as a product category where specialized graphics hardware was not generally available for consumer PCs. We have this now, every PC has some kind of graphics hardware, and has for many years. Consoles have been riding on their momentum of their brands, but the technical justification for their product category hasn't existed for 15+ years now.
- dpoloncsak 3mo agoThe main thing consoles have going for them, imo, is the standardization of hardware. It's very easy to say "Yes this game will run on my console at 60 FPS because its identical to the other consoles where it runs at 60 FPS." Differing builds and drivers are not really a concern in the console world, where-as they are in the PC world. Some console gamers seem to think PC gaming requires hours of fiddling with settings and drivers. I think we've all had that experience on PC (cough Bethesda cough), but I doubt to the degree the console-side would have you believe. Most AAA games will self-optimize their settings to a playable state, and indie games don't tend to demand more than your standard gaming laptop can provide...but I'm sure we've all been burned some 10-odd years ago buying a Steam game that just wouldn't run on your iGPU...that experience sticks around in the brain a while
- CafeRacer 3mo agoI've sold my PS5 several months ago. You can get a pretty gameable laptop and gog/steam prices are better. And I can install mods. Tree Sentinel Thomas Mod for example.
- mortenjorck 3mo agoAs bad as this is, it’s worth noting that this is the same incident that was widely reported earlier this month. Sony has only rugpulled hundreds of purchased titles from customers once this year. So far.
- bluescrn 3mo agoBut their timing was amazing, doing it just days before they announced that they were ending releases of games on physical media.
- cubefox 3mo agoInteresting also that even this article doesn't mention "DRM" anywhere despite the fact that this is exactly the worst case scenario DRM critics have always warned about. (Personally I would consider DRM okay if Sony's behavior here was illegal without a full refund.)
- jonhohle 3mo agoThis has happened since the beginning of DRM. I had a roommate who bought hundreds of dollars of music from the Walmart music store because WMAs were like 59¢ instead of 99¢ from iTunes. It seems like not even a year later they shutdown the store and the certificate expired and PlaysForSure stopped playing for sure. That was around 2003. 20 years later will anyone do anything about it? Of course not. What is going to be the event that gets laws to change? Probably not a few movies viewable only from Sony devices.
- goldenarm 3mo agoIANAL, but is it illegal to have a "Buy" button that is just a disguised "Rent" button? If not, should we change the law?
- inanutshellus 3mo ago"we're training the public that they're 'buying' a revokable license, not the song" ~MPAA ;)
- vman81 3mo agoThey'll argue you're "buying" a license that they can revoke when they feel like it. My feelings on the matter have been summed up by someone else more clever than me as: If buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.
- Garvi 3mo agoCopying something isn't stealing by any legal definition. It's copyright infringement.
- eloisius 3mo agoI’m just collecting training data for my AI.
- ivan_gammel 3mo agoauthentic intelligence?
- reactordev 3mo agoautomated intercept... or acquisition interface. /s
- RajT88 3mo agoYou wouldn't steal a baby
- acd 3mo agoIsnt there an issue with "Buy" and different countries marketing laws? Ie it implies "Hold" or "TemporaryKeep". Guess it will be an upswing of BlueRay movies. Already happening with LPs and CDs
- tremon 3mo agoThis anti-consumer stuff also applies to physical Blu-rays: each BD can contain a revocation list of player keys and distributor keys, and official players are required to update their keylists from that. Every time you insert a new disc in your player, you're playing russian roulette with your existing library.
- galleywest200 3mo agoHow does that work if my player is offline? A dedicated BluRay player has no reason to connect to the internet.
- inigyou 3mo agoEach disc contains the latest revocation list at the time of its creation. If you put in a disc with a newer revocation list, your player updates. Same thing was done on the Nintendo Wii.
- toast0 3mo agoBlu-Ray key revocation does not work that way. Players with revoked keys simply can't play discs that were encrypted to disallow them. Discs that worked with a player will continue to work, as long as the physical mechanisms are still good. Technically, maybe, since the player authenticates with the drive, if you updated the firmware on the drive you could lockout the player. I could see windows update potentially helpfully pushing a bd-rom drive firmware update, but it's not happening on a standalone player. It's not ideal that your existing player might not read new discs, but hopefully you use your discs soon after purchase and you could return them if you can't get a firmware update with a new key. (Of course, I'm guilty of buying discs to watch eventually; will be annoying if my keys were revoked)
- bogometer 3mo agoif you cant hold it your hands, you don't own it. used dvd and bluray on ebay are cheaper anyway. another underutilized resource - the public library - mine has a huge catalog of movies you can borrow for free.
- naravara 3mo agoIf you can hold it in your hands you still might not necessarily own it. Remember DivX? (The medium, not the codec).
- ssl-3 3mo agoRemember Meraki?
- teroshan 3mo ago> another underutilized resource - the public library As an indication of where things are going on this front, from the same publisher: Sony announced that games are not going to get distributed as physical copies anymore. So no new video games to be borrowed from public libraries, and even if you can borrow older games the new Playstations probably won't even have a disk tray to read them. Whatever your stance on video games being something that is worth having in a library is, if they could get away with it that's probably their ideal end game for movies as well.
- inigyou 3mo agoTime for libraries to start carrying hard drives full of pirated copies, I guess.
- gibberish678678 3mo ago[dead]
- bellowsgulch 3mo agoIf someone can take it away from you after you've paid for it.* Physically holding things in the digital age, where someone can remotely change your software, or render it unusable, isn't true ownership.
- cliglot 3mo ago[dead]
- qingcharles 3mo agoDepending on your library, you might be able to stream the same movies online for free. Check their web site.
- WalterGR 3mo agoFor more recent takes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48747389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48747389 - "Sony Deletes 551 Movies PlayStation Owners Paid For" (reclaimthenet.org) 636 points | 15 days ago | 304 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48730904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48730904 - "Sony erases digital content from libraries" (arstechnica.com) 184 points | 16 days ago | 76 comments
- CommanderData 3mo agoEveryone of these stories makes a great case for piracy. Torrents or illegal online streaming sites.
- inigyou 3mo agoIt truly does
- xvxvx 3mo agoThey removed ‘A Shaun The Sheep Movie: Farmageddon’. OK Sony, this is war.
- chaostheory 3mo agoI guess they want the masses to start sailing the high seas again
- butterfi 3mo agoIts all a bit hand wavy nonsense. Own a physical copy? How long until its unplayable because either the media corrupts or the player isn't available? The only real "ownership" is the IP, everything else is just renting.
- nemomarx 3mo agoown a physical copy, rip it into a digital format. legal and works pretty well to keep up with the times
- cesaref 3mo agoAll information is ephemeral, but I don't honestly think that argument holds much weight here. I'm currently listening to a record which was pressed before I was born, and that will outlast me. My CDs were ripped around 2000 to a drive and i've streamed then since. I've still got the CDs though, and the last time I played one it worked fine on my 1989 vintage transport. I think i'm good.
- another-dave 3mo agoWhy wouldn't a player be available though? CD/DVD players won't just suddenly stop working. My CDs and CD players at home from the 1990s are still working completely fine. If they do want to posit it as this, I'd personally be fine if they said "a CD will work for 100k plays before corrupting" so you'll have 100,000 credits to stream The Wizard of Oz before you need to purchase it again. But they need to say that upfront.
- atomicnumber3 3mo agoI trust the pressing on a CD or vinyl to remain readable SIGNIFICANTLY more than I trust any corporation to do literally anything, including "continue to exist".
- 1970-01-01 3mo agoA laser-engraved QR code can store 3KB, enough for an entire ebook. The file format isn't the problem here.
- mrguyorama 3mo ago
- shevy-java 3mo agoWell - I actually think the problem is not Sony being malicious here, per se, but the legislation. There has to be a guarantee as if it were a physical copy, as-is. The right to repair movement has the same cause ultimately. You purchase something, you own it, no matter what counter-legalese is tried. The USA really needs to stop being a corporate-country. Weren't the republicans all about the people at one point in time? Now they are all about the billionaires and family dynasties pillaging what they can, with the forerunner the mad orange king pillaging the most. And starting wars he loses by default, after promising to not start wars.
- 21asdffdsa12 3mo agoOnce its deleted it becomes a indefinite p(irate) license.
- MYEUHD 3mo agoPrevious discussions: Sony Deletes 551 Movies PlayStation Owners Paid For (294 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48747389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48747389 Sony erases digital content from libraries (74 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48730904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48730904
- xpct 3mo agoIf you bought movies on a digital platform that would later go under (could be Sony one day), what would happen to your collection? Is it transferable in any way? If not, it's already a risk no matter which platform you use.
- stronglikedan 3mo agothat's the point. you don't "buy" movies from digital platforms. you merely rent them, regardless of what the button said
- xpct 3mo agoWell I'd say these are different risks. It's either tied to the agreement Sony has with the movie provider, or with the platform itself. Either one could pull out. Or, my point, the company could also go under. What is the agreement tied to?
- 1970-01-01 3mo agoboolean bought = true; boolean owns = false; if (bought && owns) { System.out.println("Purchase resulted in ownership."); } else if (bought) { System.out.println("Purchase did not result in ownership. You have rented.");
- SlightlyLeftPad 3mo agoWithout laws to force companies to honor this, The only reasonable answer to this ownership issue will end up being piracy. Also, “Buying” the movie and making a copy of it for personal use shouldn’t be illegal.
- stronglikedan 3mo ago> Also, “Buying” the movie and making a copy of it for personal use shouldn’t be illegal. Unless I missed something recently, it's not illegal. You've always had the right to make backups of content that you purchased legally. It's the distribution that has been illegal.
- Jtarii 3mo agoIt is legal to rip a digital copy of a movie you purcahsed from itunes to your hard drive? I would have assumed it would have at least been against whatever TOC you agreed to when signing up to itunes.
- akkartik 3mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A... outlaws circumvention of DRM.
- demosthanos 3mo agoRecent and very related: Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation (797 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48745456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48745456 So Sony is simultaneously announcing that all purchases will be digital from now on while actively demonstrating that digital purchases aren't actually purchases. They're clearly communicating that they believe in a future where no one owns games any more.
- stronglikedan 3mo ago> They're clearly communicating that they believe in a future where no one owns games any more. They've been foreshadowing that future for years, but the gamers keep on bending right over and even squeezing the lube bottle for them. They haven't, and likely won't, be given a reason to stop marching toward that future.
- jeremyjh 3mo agoYet people have been “buying”games from Steam the same way for more than two decades…
- demosthanos 3mo agoFirst, I think people should buy from GoG for exactly this reason. But also, the difference is that Steam has as far as I can tell never yanked a game from someone's account and failed to refund them for it. Games either get delisted and you retain access to them or they're removed entirely and they refund you. The only exception is online-only games whose developer stops maintaining the server, but I think it's reasonable for steam to not claim responsibility for the developer's malfeasance. So Steam has this model of licensing-not-ownership on paper but in practice treats purchases as much closer to ownership. Sony clearly does not.
- jeremyjh 3mo agoHas Sony yanked a game? I know they have delisted some but I have not heard of one ever being removed from a user’s library and couldn’t find a reported instance of that happening. Sony’s agreement with game publishers does not leave them the right to do this. I do not think there is any online platform that can make such guarantees for movies.
- j1elo 3mo agoI we are heading towards a digital world, we need to solve the issue of how to ensure by legal means that in 800 years people will still be able to study current day media and arts.
- chrisweekly 3mo agoI know I'm not the only one here who remembers the Sony rootkit debacle in the age of CDs. One of the all-time worst companies I can think of when it comes to mistreating customers.
- ndsipa_pomu 3mo agoOracle enters the chat
- Cshaya 3mo agophysical media forever and always <3
- FitchApps 3mo agoSo the only "buy" option one has now is to torrent the movie? At least no one is going to delete the mp4 file.
- antihero 3mo agoThere's also Usenet.
- anal_reactor 3mo agoThe problem with torrents is that they naturally die when people lose interest.
- k4rli 3mo agoIf it's something worth watching, then very unlikely. 99.9% of movies/tv simply aren't.
- xboxnolifes 3mo agoSame goes for streaming. Torrents die much slower, since you only need a few people to care.
- ndsipa_pomu 3mo agoYes, but there's a lot of old media available on torrents that is not available elsewhere such as on on streaming services. I'm a bit of a datahoarder and will often download obscure films/tv just because they are obscure and difficult to find. It's surprising how media from the 1980/90s is only available on a couple of torrents. A more recent example (early 2000s) would be the BBC series Monkey Dust that only had the first series released on DVD due to issues with the music licensing and possibly the content which was contentious.
- anigbrowl 3mo agoThe same story again? Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48730904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48730904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48747389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48747389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48691346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48691346 and several others. Looking in search, it seems there's a Sony hate thread almost every day over the last month, and many of them are just reposts of the same thing (eg >10 submissions about Sony's decision to stop manufacturing game discs in 2028). It's also odd that these stories are attracting hundreds of comments every time; for comparison several submissions about about Xbox laying off ~5000 people have attracted less than 10 comments between them. It's looking like astroturf at this point. I don't have any connection to Sony, direct or indirect; it's just a weird pattern on HN.
- marcosdumay 3mo agoPeople like to hate Sonny products since that time they distributed malware on music CDs.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- sbr464 3mo agoYes, the chairman of StudioCanal is.
- dcchuck 3mo agoCurious what others use to store media for home/remote use. I naively assumed my purchases from [company A] would mean I have permanent/immutable access. Even in the case of access not being revoked, I've found content itself changes over time. Usually related to jokes which have "not aged well" let us say. I'm not here to champion leaving in that content. Or defend nostalgic rewatching. It just feels strange to not acknowledge.
- RetroTechie 3mo ago> Curious what others use to store media for home/remote use. A limited selection of CD/DVD/BluRay, a large collection of songs in mp3 & other formats (many ripped from CD myself @ some point, others downloaded), a bunch of movies in h264/h265 etc (mostly via torrents). Books / documentation / retrogames & more on various devices. Generally when adding anything, I look for replay value. Play/watch/listen once & never revisit stuff I save to /dev/null. In common between all the above: storage media under my control, and useable offline.
- K0balt 3mo agoSeems like a class action suit ready-made? Idk why this isn’t absolutely lawyer-crack. I mean, on one hand you have centuries of precedent about what “buy” means, and on the other you have one party depriving another party of access to their property , without providing alternative access, defacto depriving them of their property in absolute terms. This seems like a clear case of theft, conspiracy to commit theft, and fraudulent advertising, interstate commerce in the pursuit of an organized criminal enterprise , etc.
- stackedinserter 3mo agoHow do people still "buy" any movies after all these stories? If "buy" means you can watch it on this specific device while logged in with this specific account, for some limited time, then downloading it to your disk is not "theft". Seriously, my brain, deformed by years of file sharing, can't get it.
- m463 3mo agoIsn't this where some lawyers step in and file a class action lawsuit?
- not_your_vase 3mo agoThis has happened dozens of times, and it will keep happening as long as people don't care about it. Long live offline physical media, and The Pirate Bay.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- metalman 3mo agoHow is Sony not commiting piracy, ok not piracy, because a pirate at least makes an open frontal attack and says "har har har", and girls fantisise about bieng abducted by swashbucklers, but Sony is like some perv stealing peoples underware , or more accuratly a contract underware theef working for the real perv who knows where you live and nobody else like this stuff at all, zero fantasies, 100% icky perve
- ocd 3mo agoSony and other vendors got to remove the concurrency problem of tangible items, and it's only fair the internet of file sharing gets to solve the concurrency problem of a public library in the same way.
- runamuck 3mo agoIs there any way to buy long (decades) lasting physical media?
- Nevermark 3mo agoRevocation should come with full refunds. That would: 1. Balance the revocation economically, for both parties, while leaving the decision to the "seller". 2. The trade becomes the time-value of money vs. the time value of access. Inherently fair. The seller nets interest, and the inflation drop on the original price. What an accountant would come up with, yet automatic. 3. Provide users the remunerative recourse for "resuming" their "perpetual" license with another provider. 4. Motivate the avoidance of revocations, as who wants to have anti-sales. Maybe there are good reasons for revocations. Fine, but purchasers should not "Get" randomly screwed, while the seller who had control of their sourcing arrangements loses nothing. "Get" instead of "Buy" does not address the problem. If "Get" requires the user to gamble, it should be "Gamble". "Get for five years" or "Get for 5 viewings" would be ok. But "Get" without a clear definition is inherently misleading. Another dark pattern. (Also: By law, contracts must be something given for something taken. A one-sided uncompensated nullification-at-will option is a sneaky way around that. Companies that nullify without compensation, or less than full price where the licensing agreement made no refund amount declaration, should be required to return customer money with interest to reflect the bad faith contract. IANAL, just a believer in justice, especially where simple accounting provides answers.)
- dev_l1x_be 3mo agoAlso they would need to adjust the refund it with inflation.
- thfuran 3mo agoPlus interest
- chickenpotpie 3mo agoPlus interest makes no sense and is unnessary. Adjusting for inflation is so the person can buy the same movie at today's prices. At that point, the person is made more than whole already because they got to see the movie for free and they can chose to get it again.
- aeturnum 3mo agoSony is obviously the villain here (and pretty much always) but I think this points to an unsolved problem with our model of digital ownership: it's based on the media company providing a service...forever? People in this thread are saying customers should get refunds and I disagree - customers should get video files! We need a model of digital ownership that does not involve the media owner forever delivering that media on demand. Doing away with that requirement would be good for all involved. Sony has been a bad actor here and deserves every possible sorrow - and also I would like a model that retains the balance of physical media: companies give you a copy that works 'til it wears out and it's your job to keep it in working condition.
- smelendez 3mo agoThis is how it now works with music, I believe. Apple, Amazon, Bandcamp, etc. all sell you access to DRM-free files along with the ability to download or stream them in perpetuity.
- StilesCrisis 3mo agoThe iTunes store originally sold m4p (protected) files, not m4a files.
- jamesfinlayson 3mo agoIs it really the ability to download them all in perpetuity? Google Music (RIP) gave you five downloads or something like that and I thought that was on par with Apple Music at least.
- dawidpotocki 3mo agoQobuz always shows me the following message after purchasing (downloads are DRM-free FLACs): > Certain works may be withdrawn from the service for legal reasons, such as a revocation of rights. The titles purchased will then no longer be available for re-download. Download your purchases quickly.
- jamesfinlayson 3mo ago> it's based on the media company providing a service...forever? People in this thread are saying customers should get refunds and I disagree - customers should get video files! Very much agree. And while Steam could disappear tomorrow, all of the games that have been delisted are still downloadable if you bought them (I think The Movies was one of the early ones - delisted in 2007 maybe, but you can still download it if you bought it back then).
- deepsun 3mo agoDo the customers get full refund? They are definitely entitled to.
- AtlasBarfed 3mo agoHow is this not a class action lawsuit?
- ashishb 3mo agoMany of my friends are surprised that I purchase mp3s and store them in Google Drive instead of listening on Spotify or YouTube. Heck, I even wrote a player for this [1] The problem is that licensed media like this are always going to become inaccessible over decades. It happened with Apple[2] and Microsoft (PlaysForSure[3]) as well. 1 - https://musicsync.ashishb.net/ https://musicsync.ashishb.net/ 2 - https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/you-dont-own-your-digital-movies/ https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/you-dont-own-your-di... 2 - https://www.cnet.com/culture/playsforsure-officially-dead/ https://www.cnet.com/culture/playsforsure-officially-dead/
- abustamam 3mo ago"If buying digital media isn't ownership, then piracy isn't stealing." I'm all for buying media. People worked hard on that stuff. They deserve to be compensated. But if I buy something and then it can randomly be taken away from me at the whims of the publisher or copyright owner or whoever the hell, then I don't "own" that. And if ~I can't~ they won't let me own digital media, I have no qualms over acquiring such media in other ways, given the ongoing war against physical media anyway
- firen777 3mo agoI guess companies saw SKG being effectively thrown out by the EU, got bold enough and decided to normalize this practice to the rest of the digital medium.
- jqpabc123 3mo agoNot your disk, not your data.
- tjpnz 3mo agoWhy does Sony seem to be the only one having this problem? Do Google and Apple also engage in this practice?
- ticklyjunk 3mo ago[dead]
- supermatt 3mo agoIt's not rocket science. If they want to revoke a license, they should buy it back at the price they sold it. Consumer law should dictate there be no permissible alternative, and should apply retroactively. Personally, I dont like theses digital "purchase" licenses at all. The only "rights" DRM is used for is to restrict those of the consumer - a far cry from the transferable digital rights that big-media touted that resulted in them receiving overreaching protections for copyright in the first place. Unless they are transferable, all digital licenses should be short term (<= 1mo) and marked clearly as a rental to avoid consumer confusion.
- sharts 3mo agoEasy fix — customers get immunity if caught pirating said content. That’s really all it means to have a license to something anyway.
- ghusto 3mo agoThere are a lot of well thought out good solutions being posted here, but you have to bear in mind that these companies don't see a problem to be solved in the first place. It's like telling a mafia boss the solution to the cops being after him is to quit doing criminal things. The solution is piracy.
- Fizzadar 3mo agoThis is why people pirate.